TODAY WE ARE DELIGHTED TO WELCOME OUR GUEST AUTHOR, TONY J FORDER, WHO IS SHARING CHAPTER 1 FROM HIS NOVEL, 'THE STONEMASON'S SONG #RWRTeamBlog #ReadWriteRepeat
- Eva Bielby
- 7 hours ago
- 13 min read
CHAPTER ONE
Police Constable Helen Pryce swore as she hugged the wheel of the Skoda Octavia SR. The downpour that had been threatening for the past hour suddenly fell from the sky as if a dam had burst somewhere above the roiling clouds that looked very much like the mushroom variety. The car’s wipers, even when swishing at top speed in a synchronised blur of motion, struggled to bat the rainwater away from the windscreen, such was the intensity of the deluge. Pryce and her partner, PC John Duncan, were seven hours into a shift during which they had attended two domestics, a nasty but non-fatal RTC on the A1, and had arrested a belligerent drunk in the city centre who had taken great delight in urinating outside McDonalds, but this was easily the scariest moment of their day so far.
Pryce eased her foot off the accelerator and glanced down at the display panel to make sure the headlights were on, hoping drivers around her were doing the same. To her immense relief the torrent blew past almost as swiftly as it had come, though a steady rain continued to assault the car’s roof.
‘Phew!’ she said, adding a nervous laugh and pretending to wipe sweat from her brow. ‘That got my heart racing.’
‘And here’s me thinking only I had that effect on you,’ Duncan replied with a lopsided grin.
‘Yeah, you wished, Doughnuts.’
He was an excellent partner. Fun to be around, and both pliable and forceful as necessary when it came to the requirements of the job. She felt safe whenever they worked together, and for Pryce that was crucial. He’d earned his nickname after polishing off a box of six jam doughnuts with his morning cup of tea in the canteen one day, resulting in some wag christening him Duncan Doughnuts as he licked sugar from his fingers.
He started to respond once more but was interrupted by their vehicle’s call sign coming over the radio. He echoed Pryce’s instinctive groan of frustration before responding. They’d been hoping to get off duty on time for a change, but a shout with less than an hour remaining on the clock was not a good omen. She picked up on the address as it was read out over the Airwave and put her foot down. They were already heading anticlockwise on the Fletton Parkway, so she navigated the Skoda past the next junction then took the exit by Fletton Lake. Further on she turned left onto Whittlesea Road, drove beyond the Aldi supermarket, went straight on at the dual mini-roundabout junction before pulling off the road and parking up on a narrow access path beneath the flyover.
By now the rain had stopped altogether, the low-lying dark clouds scudding away to the west as if being pursued by something predatory. As the two police officers exited the Skoda, Pryce felt the early autumn humidity in the air, and her white shirt quickly began clinging to her back like a leech. A man stood waiting by a wide expanse of concrete support wedged at about a 45-degree angle into a sturdy mound of earth overgrown with vegetation. Grey-haired, tall with a serious pot belly, the man carrying a lot of excess weight and dressed in a Rolling Stones t-shirt and camouflage cargo shorts stood his ground until both officers joined him.
He introduced himself as John Kirwan, ex-police constable and current local homeowner. Kirwan explained that a bunch of kids who often spent time getting up to who knew what mischief beneath the flyover had somehow managed to break up a section of the concrete and inevitably proceeded to throw several large chunks onto the road. Already concerned about their behaviour, he thought they might be tempted to start chucking pieces at vehicles, which is why he first called the police. He’d then marched over to give the kids a piece of his mind, at which point to his surprise they scattered like cockroaches.
‘I removed the larger chunks from the road,’ he finished. ‘But then while I was waiting to hear back from your lot I thought I’d check out the condition of the concrete to see what damage the kids had caused. That’s when I saw… what I saw. I thought I might not get a fast response from you if you thought it was just a bunch of idiots running amok, so I called again.’
The radio message had mentioned a man finding something suspicious, but had not elaborated further. Helen Pryce gave a perfunctory nod, assuming this wasn’t going to amount to anything major.
‘So what exactly did you discover?’ she asked.
Kirwan gestured towards the support and suggested they check it for themselves. She asked him to remain where he was before strolling over with her colleague to examine the devastation left behind by a bunch of youngsters intent on demolition.
PC Duncan peered into the sizeable, jagged hole that had been exposed. He then turned to Pryce, frowned, grinned, and said, ‘Wow! A unicorn graveyard of all things.’
Pryce stifled a laugh, not quite grasping what they were looking at other than the grey and dusty conical shape spearing up through the debris just beneath the surface.
‘You need to examine it more closely from the other side,’ Kirwan called out behind them, jabbing the moist air with a finger. ‘Crouch a bit lower and you’ll soon see.’
With great reluctance, Duncan did as suggested. His eyes narrowed at first, then widened almost comically. In complete silence, he beckoned Pryce forward. She adopted a similar stance, followed his gaze, and moments later echoed his reaction. Her head jerked up with a start. She stared at her colleague for a moment, then looked back over her shoulder at Kirwan.
‘Shit!’ she mouthed.
He nodded. ‘Shit indeed.’
**********
MY DI JIMMY BLISS SERIES
My DI Jimmy Bliss crime series is set in Peterborough because that’s where I was living at the time. Having moved up from my London home I was feeling a little displaced at the time, and it was probably inevitable that my main character would feel the same way.
I wrote the first book, Bad to the Bone, not intending to do anything with it other than perhaps print out a few copies and let a few people have a read. I was a hobby writer with no dreams of publication and that was the way I saw myself so there was never any sense of frustration at not being published. Then along came a job loss, and a suggestion by my wife that I take my writing more seriously. I did precisely that by submitting the book to a publisher with a solid reputation for producing crime novels. My last day at work was 31 December 2016, and on 1 February 2017 I signed my first ever publishing contract.
Prior to Bad to the Bone I wrote a book entitled Burnout. By the time I was done with it I decided it wasn’t up to much, but I knew I wanted to work with some of the characters again. Even so, having written Bad to the Bone I never anticipated writing another – it simply never occurred to me that I could write a series, let alone a long-running one.
The Stonemason’s Song, which was published on 8 December 2025, was book number fourteen in the Bliss series (I’ve published an additional 6 novels and a Bliss prequel novella as well). The series has been more successful than I could ever have imagined in my wildest dreams, and has been an Amazon bestseller along the way.
People often ask me if it easier to write a series novel rather than a standalone. The truth is, there are pros and cons. With a series novel the main characters are of course familiar, so the writing of their scenes is second nature. I know the way they think, the way they behave, the way they are with each other, so their reactions just occur on the page, and the dialogue flows. But there are always new characters to add into the mix, so they take a fair bit of thinking about. In a police procedural series in particular there is a danger of allowing those procedures to become boring, so I try to mix it up as much as possible, show them in their different stages, but of course this has to be balanced with the familiar which is inevitable. Keeping things fresh is the key to a long-running series, and I try to do that with very different storylines, by giving my regular characters story arcs and introducing interesting key characters both good and bad.
Another regular question is whether character or story are a priority. It’s easy to say both and mean it, but I always add a caveat: I sincerely believe that a great character can carry a book if the story isn’t quite working, but I don’t think it works the other way around. I enjoy driving my storylines with both plot and character, but I always give my characters the freedom to become central to everything. I just happen to think that characters remain in the mind longer than the storylines after the book is closed.
Once I knew I was writing a series, everything changed. My focus was no longer on the book in hand alone, but also on what came before it and what might come next. What did I need to update my readers on from the previous book – if anything – and what did I need to include so that new readers wouldn’t feel completely lost? The idea is to produce a book that can stand on its own in addition to fitting in with the series as a whole. That includes thinking ahead and perhaps leaving something for your readers to ponder or even to surprise them. For instance, in my previous book, The Honourable Rogue, the Major Crime Unit are working on a case and getting nowhere with it when they have to put it to one side in order to tackle a more active threat. That case becomes active again in The Stonemason’s Song, so there is a sense of continuity for the reader – I like to include moments like these even if readers might not notice. Mind, you’d be surprised at how many do and go on to let me know about it.
There are several things I set out to achieve with this series. The first was to make it believable and then natural. Although these are works of fiction I used as many real places as possible – the Thorpe Wood Police Station in Peterborough, for example. I also use a police advisor who was once a Chief Superintendent for Brighton, with the aim of making it as authentic as possible. I use the procedure plus the experiences and instincts of police officers to figure out the cases, and don’t rely on sudden moments of coincidence to break a case. I also put a great deal of effort into making my characters natural, with real flaws, real issues to deal with, real personalities – both good and bad – and I especially work hard at the dialogue in trying to make that flow as normal conversations often do.
I’ve had to research some simply dreadful things, but along the way I have spoken to a number of specialists who have been so kind in answering my questions. I’ve spoken to the Metropolitan Police, the National Crime Agency, the Royal Air Force, a Child Protection Unit, an Undertaker talked me through embalming someone still alive, and a current Crime Scene Investigator has helped me out a number of times on current and specific procedure. Among the less desirable research subjects I’ve looked into are necklacing, decapitation, people trafficking, organised crime punishments such as acid attacks and getting rid of a body in a barrel of acid. I’ve had to find out how long a corpse can remain both out in the open and locked away in a freezer before it starts to break down, and be able to describe the odours of putrefaction. In reality I probably use a tenth of what I learn, but knowledge is rarely wasted.
Getting back to my main character, Jimmy Bliss was born and raised on east London. His father was a sergeant, and Jimmy joined up, did his time in uniform before moving sideways into CID. I used my prequel novella, Bliss Uncovered, to cover this stage of his life and his first case as a detective constable. Following the murder of his wife, Hazel, Bliss moved out of London to Peterbrough, where his time as a detective inspector had, shall we say, its ups and downs. He actually had two separate stints at Thorpe Wood, in between which he worked with the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, which later became the National Crime Agency.
Because I allowed Bliss to age naturally he reached compulsory retirement. I had the idea to have him work cold cases as a civilian as I knew this was something police forces were doing. But during a chat with my police advisor, he revealed that some were allowing ex-detective civilians to act as Senior Investigating Officers. Having Jimmy Bliss do both jobs seemed ideal, and it was only then that I realised the only thing he couldn’t do that he did before was to make an arrest, because he no longer carried a warrant card. So it was that books 12, 13 and 14 follow Bliss working as both a Civilian SIO and an Unsolved Cases Team investigator. Because I’ve always had at least two storylines running in separate threads in my books – one being the main case, the other being the lesser – it meant my writing didn’t have to accommodate anything new other than arrest procedure, which Bliss hadn’t done much of in recent book anyway. Pretty much the only changes are in attempting to give the two storylines an equal amount of time on the page, and introducing new colleagues into his everyday life.
There are pivotal books in this series. Bad to the Bone because it’s the first; If Fear Wins because with book #3 I felt I’d really got to grips with the team and the methodology; Endless Silent Scream because it introduced a character who was originally supposed to last a few chapters, only for her to become a recurring character throughout; The Autumn Tree because I felt at the time that it was my best work; What Dies Inside Us because it was Jimmy’s final weeks as a warranted police officer; Something More to Say because it was the continuation of the series beyond DI Jimmy Bliss; and now The Stonemason’s Song for reasons I cannot reveal, but which readers will understand why I’ve included it here. In this latest book, Jimmy finds himself in trouble with Freemasons, a major organised crime gang in London, as well as his own Police and Crime Commissioner.
The DI Jimmy Bliss series amounts to roughly 1,400,000 words. It took time to write them and then craft them into something people might want to read. But my readers seem to think it was all worthwhile. In the main my reviews have been wonderful, and an awful lot of people have become loyal Bliss readers who want the next the moment they’ve finished reading the latest. It’s a series I am proud of, and when people compare by books to those written by some of my own favourite crime writers, I can’t but help be comforted by a warm glow inside.
I wrote them for myself first and foremost, but after a while I also wrote them with one eye firmly on what my readers might want to see happen. The relationship between Jimmy Bliss and his colleague Penny Chandler – at various times throughout the series a DC, a DS, and now a DI – is about as close as two people can be. Despite the difference in their ages, readers often queried ‘will they or won’t they’ get together as a couple. I let that run for a few books and occasionally even played up to it, but it was never my intention to get them together in an intimate way. They were friends. In fact, they were the best of friends, and so they remain.
Over the course of the series I’ve had lesser characters come and go, some shifted sideways, others retired, others still promoted. It’s allowed me to keep the working environment fresh, as has introducing central characters for individual books, required for their expertise or due to a joint task force being established. I’ve had counter-terrorism, MI5, various other forces, and I’ve had plenty of villains crossing swords with Bliss and his team. A few were violent animals, one or two more pleasant, while most were simply criminals for Bliss to see banged up and forgotten about. I can’t even begin to count how many characters I’ve given life to, but it runs into the hundreds.
Although based in Peterborough, the cases Bliss works take him up and down the country, and even to California on one occasion. Providing different settings, even if only for a few chapters at a time, is another way of keeping the series fresh and interesting. I seldom dwell on descriptions, but I hope the way I do describe them tells the reader enough to capture places in their mind’s eye. I tend to be a pretty ‘visual’ kind of writer, so it’s my hope that on some level most readers will ‘see’ the scenes play out across the pages. Above all, I write to entertain, and I hope that’s how people feel when they close a book at the end.
Book #01: Bad to the Bone http://tiny.cc/BttB
Book #14: The Stonemason’s Song http://tiny.cc/TSSong
BIO AND LINKS
BIO
Tony J Forder is the author of the bestselling DI Bliss crime thriller series. Bad to the Bone, The Scent of Guilt, If Fear Wins, The Reach of Shadows, The Death of Justice, Endless Silent Scream, Slow Slicing, The Autumn Tree, Darker Days to Come, The Lightning Rod, What Dies Inside Us, Something More to Say, and The Honourable Rogue. There is also a prequel novella available called Bliss Uncovered.
Tony’s other books include two action-adventure thrillers, Scream Blue Murder and Cold Winter Sun, featuring reluctant hero Mike Lynch. Also, The Huntsmen and The Predators, feature DS Royston Chase, DC Claire Laney, and PCSO Alison May, both police procedural novels set in Wiltshire. In addition, Tony has written two standalone novels: a dark, psychological crime thriller, Degrees of Darkness, and a suspense thriller set in California, Fifteen Coffins.
Tony's first 8 novels were originally released by a publisher specialising in crime fiction. In 2020, Tony decided to strike out on his own, and subsequently negotiated the return of all publishing rights to himself. Each of those 8 books has subsequently been re-released under his own imprint, Spare Nib Books.
Tony lives with his wife in West Sussex, UK, and is a full-time author. His first love was music, and he is currently gobbling up as many remastered vinyl albums as he can. Tony has played guitar since his early childhood, and despite selling off his collection at one point he has somehow managed to reacquire a new range and is up to 5 without knowing how.
Tony is currently working on Jimmy Bliss books #14, The Stonemason’s Song.
Links
All of Tony’s links can be found on Linktree: https://linktr.ee/TonyJForder
COMING SOON: On Sunday, 14th December, we are delighted to welcome our guest author, Annie Carlisle, who is sharing chapter one of her novel, 'No Axe to Grind'.
